There’s so much in this month’s magazine I don’t know where to start! There’s a long, hard look at the Church, beginning with our own Parish Finances and a Survey I urge you all to read and complete because we need help and can make use of almost any time or skill you may be able to put at our disposal; moving on we look at the Diocesan situation and the launch of the London Challenge and then out into the wider, Persecuted Church, this month focussing on the Sudan. None of it makes for encouraging reading but read it anyway – we can’t bury our heads in the sand; whether it’s how the parish will cope, how the Diocese will pay our clergy or how Christians survive under horrific circumstances it’s all our church, it all concerns us.
On a lighter note there’s a whole section of reviews – The Bald Prima Donna, Desert Island Discs, the Martindale Sidwell Memorial Recital – and an introduction to Paradise Lost, being produced in church later in the month. We also have two concerts, one given by South Hampstead High School and the other by Camden Choir.
A lot of people have been on the move and report on their travels: Mother Sarah went to the Holy Land, John and Sara Hester visited the Asra Hawariat School while they were in Ethiopia and a whole bus load of us went to Lincoln for the Installation of Philip Buckler as Dean.
You might think that was enough for one month but 25th March sees the anniversary of the abolition of slavery and that’s something that can’t go unmentioned and then I found that 27th is the day for remembering Rupert, Bishop of Worms and Salzburg – the founder of a monastery not far from where a certain nun brought the hills alive……. couldn’t resist that!
So it’s a bumper edition; make it your Lenten task to peruse it from cover to cover, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest its contents – and don’t forget to fill in the survey [if there wasn’t one inside your copy there will be spares on the shelf in the church].
And finally, and a help to get your volunteering underway, it’s time for the Voluntary Rate again – this is one of our fund and awareness raising activities which involves sending information about the church and an appeal to all the households in the parish. You can help by coming to the Gregory room on Wednesday 7th March and helping put 4.500 leaflets in envelopes and then by taking some of those letters and delivering them. The money all goes to the fabric fund which, between the new boiler and our plans for developing areas of the church, needs all the help it can get. It’s all local and has to be done by the end of March so there’s plenty of time. On a nice day, with the right street, it can even be quite enjoyable – fresh air, exercise, we’re doing you a favour really!
March
Judy East